The Survivor Mitzvah Project: Helping Elderly Holocaust Survivors

I hadn't heard about the Survivor Mitzvah Project until a couple of days ago when I saw it featured on CNN. So decided to find out more. What a wonderful cause. Make sure you check out their newsletters, which are available for online reading. If you aren't moved by these stories, you have but a stone where your heart should be.

http://www.survivormitzvah.org/
About The Survivor Mitzvah Project
Helping Elderly Holocaust Survivors in Eastern Europe and the Former USSR

The Survivor Mitzvah Project is a humanitarian effort providing direct financial aid to elderly Holocaust Survivors in remote areas of Eastern Europe and Ukraine. They are in desperate need of food, medicine, suitable shelter, and some loving kindness. Most are sole survivors of their families who were murdered by the Nazis, many are the last Jews in their town or village, some are survivors of the killing fields, some fought with the Russians or as Partisans in the forests of Belarus, and some were slaves in the Gulag long after the war ended. All are elderly and in dire need of help. Alone and isolated, they do not receive WWII reparation funds from Germany.

The genesis of this project lies in a series of paths that fortuitously crossed, creating a meaningful link between people from all over the world. I am a television comedy director by trade and during a hiatus from directing and producing sitcoms I decided to take a brief journey to Eastern Europe in order to find the birthplaces of my grandparents. In Lithuania, I met the brilliant Professor Dovid Katz of Vilnius University whose important expeditions in Eastern Europe seek out the last remaining Shtetl Jews, bringing them aid, studying their Yiddish dialects and documenting their unique life histories on film. He urged me to stop along the way and visit eight elderly, isolated Holocaust survivors living in tiny towns and villages in Belarus and bring them food, medicine, Yiddish newspapers and American dollars. My visit with these elderly survivors was both life-changing and inspiring...

... These elderly survivors, living in small huts, with little or no money for food, heat and needed medications, existed on what food they could grow, mostly potatoes. How long could these people, in their 80s and 90s, continue to dig the earth and face the increasing challenges of illness and old age without any help? It was a question that haunted me....

For more on the Survivor Mitzvah project, visit: http://www.survivormitzvah.org/